Like the Plate Says

So, our last full day in Yellowknife is drawing to a close.  Tomorrow we'll head out to Whitehorse for the second leg of our adventure.  I'm really looking forward to hitting Whitehorse, but that's not knocking Yellowknife, I'm just excited to sync up with Gray and Susan and get in to the longer stretch of vacation.  When you know that you're only going to be in one place for a few days you don't want to unpack and get comfortable, and it really accentuates that "living out of a suitcase" feeling.  We'll be in Whitehorse long enough that I'll be able to really settle in and relax.

We started our day off by heading back to Old Town.  We hadn't quite wrapped up our tour of the area, and wanted to walk a few more of the streets, including this most famous of roads:

Is that a joke?  Well, kind of, but it's an old joke.  Apparently a couple of guys in the early days of Yellowknife were living in shacks, like you did, and decided to put up a sign indicating their extreme poverty.  They declared their road "Ragged Ass Road" as "Ragged Ass" was the popular slang for being flat broke at the time.  Apparently the joke caught on and by the time Yellowknife was a proper city with formally named roads there was only one thing you could get away with calling it.  The denizens of Ragged Ass Road now seem to be doing fairly well for themselves, and it's a beautiful stretch to walk through.  They've left a few pieces of evidence for us though, so that we can all be clear about where the name comes from.

This one might actually be an old ice fishing hut, but it lacks the usual trap door in the floor for fishing through.  Also I've seen worse looking domiciles in the old photos, so...

This beauty?  Definitely an old house.  You see the severed power lines from when this used to be hooked up to the power grid.

After wrapping up our time in Old Town we headed up to the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre.  This is a museum dedicated to the history and culture of the Northwest Territories.  It's a beautiful facility which is free to visit (donations accepted) so it really should be on the itinerary of every visitor to Yellowknife.  There were some great exhibits on old equipment used by early prospectors, or the local flora and fauna.  A particularly striking exhibit had to do with the building of a moose-skin canoe, which remains the only one of its kind preserved for display.

It may be hard to gauge the size of that boat from the photo, but I'd put it at about 30 ft. long.  It was absolutely massive!  They had a video playing that outlined the construction and operation of the boat and it was incredible to watch.  This is a true treasure that they have on display here.

After that we grabbed some lunch and then headed back to the site of the museum to hike a trail in the area.  It is now time for an ancient and wonderful Colin's Wanderings tradition!  Ladies and Gentlemen, I am happy to announce that I have great pictures from the trail, and you will all have to just @#$%ing wait to see them.  That's right, it's time for another tale of Technological Woes While Blogging (TWWB)™.  For the newer readers, I have never successfully blogged a trip without running into something that prevented me from writing on a regular basis and including my photos.  I am currently equipped with a magnificent Pixelbook, a Bluetooth mouse for precision work, and a compact SD card adaptor that works with USB-C to allow me to get my photos from my camera.  I'm in a big city so there should be no internet woes.  I am primed and ready for some perfect blogging, and have so far managed to keep from any first-world whining about the difficulties of performing my duties.  However, it turns out that the internet in Yellowknife is well and truly awful.  I've managed to get by so far with sheer patience, but this time my photos just aren't uploading, and I don't think there's a lot that I can do to remedy that situation.  So I'm just going to have to hope for a more solid connection when I get to Whitehorse so that I can share the rest of today's photos with you.  Suffice it to say that we had a very good hike.  It was pretty.

It's really unfortunate actually, because the photos were the rest of my story for the day.  I'm left now to reflect on the sheer natural beauty that I've seen here, without any images to back me up.  The trail that moves north from the museum is just part of a nine kilometre loop around Frame Lake that will also lead you to the territorial legislature, city hall, the hospital, and great swathes of parkland.  I'm trying to picture a world in which you could go about a hundred metres behind Queen's Park and find marshland, and a sign promoting awareness of black bear activity.  A brief walk to the south and we're seeing muskrat, and a majestic raven alerts us to his presence.  It really doesn't feel like it should even be possible in the heart of a city, but there it is.

Even though it's just been a brief stopover on the way to another destination I've still really enjoyed my time here.  There's a casual, relaxed attitude that permeates everything and there is a magnificent vista at every turn.  The entire territory is vast, and it feel tragic only being able to see a tiny corner of it, but I'm happy for the experience I've had.  I've always liked the welcoming "Yours to Discover" on the license plates in Ontario, and I feel like the Northwest Territories plates also do a brilliant job of describing the state of things here in a single word: Spectacular.